Read Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) for Free Online

lipstick at the table after every meal I ever ate with her.
    Although she had never really made it as a model, she had been beautiful enough, and enjoyed adequate success with men because of it, that she hung on to a haughty pride about her looks. This would have been startling enough in the wilds of Maine. It was compounded by the fact that I was the kind of country girl who was sprinkled with freckles and had thick, frizzy hair with a tendency to tangle and snarl.
    Like other little girls, I adored pink and dolls and ballet. But I was hopeless at girly things. I spent all of my time reading or playing in the woods. And Mom, who sewed most of my clothes and believed that girls should be as free as boys to enjoy their childhood fancies without concern for their appearance, was in exact opposition to Betty. It wasn’ta problem, exactly. I adored Betty’s posh ways and lapped up the many precious dresses she sent me in beautiful boxes from Macy’s and Lord & Taylor, encased in diaphanous sheets of tissue paper that smelled like spun sugar. But even with the gifts, Betty frequently observed me with a critical eye.
    That first summer, the Big B sent her commandment up from New York City for Mom to find us suitable lodging. She then arrived by Greyhound bus. Mom dutifully picked her up and took us to the cottage she’d rented, where Betty and I proceeded to sit for the next week. Betty couldn’t drive, didn’t cook, and outside of the city, she only seemed interested in reading the paper and smoking cigarettes.
    Betty didn’t like to discuss her past, which I later learned had been painful. She didn’t speak much of my father, who seemed uneasy about her role in my life, if grateful for her generosity toward me. And when she did speak of him, she could be cutting, as she was regarding just about everyone, including me. My father later told me how she’d been orphaned by age eighteen and swindled by a lawyer out of a piece of family property in Cleveland; how her husband, a theater actor, had abandoned her and their daughter for Hollywood; how her boyfriends had led her to become an alcoholic; how when he was a teenager it seemed likely she’d started drinking again in secret, and had sometimes been a kept woman, if not an outright whore; how she’d used food to control him as a boy, and let him smoke and drink in the apartment as a teen, hiding him when he went AWOL from the US Navy, all, he believed, in an attempt to manipulate him, but also, he had to grudgingly admit, as a kind of twisted unconditional love, as was the fact that she gave him money and a place to stay, no matter how bad his gambling was.
    Betty would sometimes talk about how she’d taken my father to the Jersey Shore with this or that boyfriend when he was young. I loved her anecdotes because they were so exotic to me and contained the character of my dad as a child, which I had trouble wrapping my mind around, just as I did with the stories Grammy told me about Mom.
    The people in Betty’s stories—not just boyfriends, but also the friends who took her on car trips or rode out to Atlantic City with her on senior bus outings that included a roll of quarters—always dropped out of her life at some point in the tales. Even at an early age, I had a feeling that her strong personality had driven them away.
    Betty had a loud voice that carried, and she felt entitled to speak unpleasant truths because of her age. At the same time, she was deeply paranoid. Once when I spoke Betty’s name too loudly in a store, she glared at me.
    â€œThey’ll hear you,” she hissed.
    I froze, unused to being addressed so harshly.
    â€œWho?” I dared to ask.
    â€œI can’t have everyone knowing my name,” she said, looking around her.
    Now I was afraid, but for a different reason. This strange woman was my caretaker for the week.
    Betty relished eating out, and she especially liked the kind of